125. BATTERY HEALTH & SAFETY IN YOUR 5G PHONE

Everyone’s excited about 5G. And with good reason. All the great things we have been able to do on our smart phones with 4G LTE will multiply into bigger and better things in the 5G Era. We’ll be able to send and receive huge text and image files in the blink of an eye. Entire movies will download in seconds. In short, 5G will make our smart phones vastly more useful as business productivity tools and as entertainment platforms. I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait.

There’s just one thing. The excellent experiences of 5G can’t happen without battery power.

Unfortunately, batteries are a major stumbling block of the smart phone era. Explosions and fires, although rare, are a serious problem. One such mishap is too many.

A little history: Introduced commercially in 1991, lithium-ion batteries are a tremendous advance over previous-generation technology, such as nickel-cadmium and nickel-metal hydride, and they have made the 4G LTE era possible. But in the 5G era, lithium-ion batteries risk being exposed as the weakest link in the chain of 5G-enabling technologies.

This looming catastrophe is no secret. Smart phone manufacturers and network operators I speak with are concerned about 5G and the demands that will be placed on handsets. They know something must be done. But what?

Researchers are working night and day to come up with breakthrough battery technology, such as solid-state batteries or batteries using nano materials. But battery breakthroughs often take a decade or more, and billions of dollars in investments. Much more work needs to be done before these next-generation batteries are ready to be deployed in large volumes. Realistically, we need to accept the fact that 5G will dawn on smart phones equipped with lithium-ion batteries. The only sensible approach is to get those batteries as ready as they can be for the new era.

Briefly, here’s the issue: Every battery has a cathode and an anode, in a substance called the electrolyte. During charging, ions move from the cathode to the anode through the electrolyte. In lithium-ion batteries, tiny tree-like growths called dendrites may form on the anode over repeated charging cycles. These dendrites can grow so large that they eventually reach through, touching the cathode and causing an electrical short, possibly leading to an explosion or fire. Dendrite formation is accelerated by factors that stress the battery, such as rapid charging or overcharging. Damage caused by these stresses accumulates over time.

5G will put stress on batteries as never before, thanks to several factors:

The higher-frequency bands of 5G require more power. 5G encompasses new frequency bands of 3 GHz to 6 GHz and above 24 GHz. Power consumption increases linearly with frequency, so going from 900 MHz to 6 GHz, for example, incurs a 5x increase in power demand all else being equal.

Data traffic will increase substantially. Even though 5G is highly efficient, throughput rates will be higher and displays will be larger. More bits will be streaming at rates exceeding 1 Gbit per second, requiring additional power.

5G apps will require low latency, about one millisecond. For example, streaming video on a larger screen will sharply reduce idle time for the processor and battery. That means greater power consumption.

5G will require denser placement of antennas across the landscape, and until carriers add more antennas, handsets and their batteries will have to work harder.

In all, network operators estimate 25% to 50% increase in power demand.

Preparedness

There is hope, however, if intelligent battery management software is implemented. The first step is to reduce the stress on the battery; the second is to monitor battery health so that danger is spotted before problems occur. These twin tasks are simple in principle but challenging in practice.

To measure the chemical processes at work, it is possible to utilize the electrical current that charges the battery as a kind of messenger. By applying principles similar to sonar, it is possible to retrieve information from the electrical current’s echo about the chemical reactions within the battery. Based on that information, the reactions can be tuned to make them better performing. These same signals also relay information as to any problems that are developing, such as the dendritic formations that produce electrical shorts.

By lessening battery stress and monitoring battery health, doubling battery longevity is a reasonable expectation. Most phone batteries are rated at 500 charging cycles, but that can be increased to 1000. And battery life isn’t the only thing that can be improved. As a battery charges and recharges, it enlarges in size, gaining perhaps 10 percent in volume. Intelligent battery management can cut that swelling in half.

Simply put, intelligent battery management is a must-have for all smart phones. Nothing else does a better job ensuring battery health and safety. As we await the arrival of 5G, there is no need to despair or to become impatient with the slow progress of battery chemistry technology, when intelligent battery management is here today.